France’s Weird Jihadi Re-Education Camps Could Become ISIS Incubators – The Daily Beast

The idea is to herd suspected extremists into mysterious “deradicalization centers” all over the country. There are an estimated 9,000 radicalized—or “potentially radicalized”—jihadis believed to be in France, officials say. Another 2,000 French nationals are thought to have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight for the Islamic State.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said last week that France will establish as many as 13 centers all over the country—picture an odd mix of halfway house, prison, and sleepover camp—where Islamist radicals or those who show signs of wanting to join the jihad in Syria and Iraq will be housed and “re-educated.” Oh, and they’ll be monitored “day and night” for 10 months while wearing special uniforms, Valls said.

But will Valls’s centers help stem the rising tide of radicalism in France or will they become, as one Muslim leader in southern France put it, a “French Guantanamo”?

Some say it would be better to help French Muslim religious leaders police their own. Several are quietly teaching their adherents how best to fight ISIS. But since some of them adhere to fundamentalist Salafi doctrine, they often are labeled as Islamist political extremists.

The core, critical difference is that followers of ISIS are takfiris intent on waging their murderous version of jihad against those who do not share their beliefs down to the letter, including fellow Muslims.

Most Muslims, even the very devout and conservative, do not agree. Indeed, they see the takfiris as deeply dangerous and divisive for the global community of believers. But these are hard distinctions for an aggressively secular French government to make.

“My combat against Daesh [ISIS] is very well known but it doesn’t make the papers,” Sheikh Abdel Hadi, the Algerian-born imam at the Es-Sunnah mosque in a gritty area of Marseille, told The Daily Beast. “We know our people better than the politicians in France do.”

Abdel Hadi, 54, has been giving courses to young people all over France, Italy, and Spain about how best to explain to Muslims and non-Muslims that ISIS’s ideology has nothing to do with Islam, and he has shown them how to prevent ISIS from recruiting.

In contrast, Valls’s plan calls for specially trained psychological counselors and teachers who will administer a treatment program for men and women between the ages of 18 and 30 who haven’t been convicted of committing actual crimes but whom judges deem a threat to the republic.

“Each era has its challenges,” Valls said at a Paris press conference last Monday. “The fight against jihad is undoubtedly the big challenge of our generation. Radicalization and terrorism are linked. We are faced with a stubborn phenomenon that has widely spread through society and which threatens it because it could expand massively.”

Asiem el Difraoui, a political scientist known for his studies on jihadists, told Le Parisiennewspaper that he was against what he called “these jihadist academies” because the group setting might foster radicalism much the way the French prison system does, not discourage it.

Source: France’s Weird Jihadi Re-Education Camps Could Become ISIS Incubators – The Daily Beast